Kyle Gawley – How To Build a SaaS Product

Building a SaaS Product Is Hard

There’s a lot to build:

• Secure authentication
• Billing and payments
• User interface design
• Organisations, users and roles
• APIs and communications
• Tests & security
• Plus lots more

In this course you will

• Learn how to build a SaaS product from scratch
• Level up your skills with industry-standard knowledge
• Eliminate the pain of learning how to build a SaaS product
• Learn by step-by-step code video walkthroughs
• Create an Instagram-style photo-sharing app with React & Node.js

What You’ll Learn In How To Build a SaaS Product?

1 – Architecture Of a SaaS Application

• Understanding client & server
• What is an API?
• Understanding Model-View-Controller
• Single or multi-tenant SaaS?
• Features of a SaaS app

2 – Building Your Stack

• Does tech stack matter?
• Why use Javascript?
• Which framework is best?
• Setting up the project
• Configuring the development environment

3 – Data Modelling

• Why start with data?
• Relational or non-relational data?
• Data modelling tools
• Designing data models
• Normalisation, Foreign Keys & Cascades

4 – Controllers & Models

• Scaffolding the models
• CRUD anatomy
• ORMs and query builders
• Creating the models & controllers
• Security considerations

5 – Building a REST API

• What is a REST API?
• Building the API
• Global error handling
• Throttling for security
• Testing with Postman

6 – Authentication Part 1 (Server-Side)

• Issuing JWT auth tokens
• Sign up and sign in flows
• Protecting API endpoints
• User roles and permissions
• Creating scoped API keys

7 – Email Notifications

• Setting up Mailgun
• Building a mail module
• Avoid HTML table hell with JSON emails
• Allowing users to customise email settings
• Sending email notifications to users

8 – Authentication Part 2 (Client-Side)

• Client authentication best practices
• Client routing & private routes
• Sign in and Sign up flows
• Forgot password flow
• Sign out flow

9 – Bonus: UI Design School

• Layout
• Colour
• Scale
• Typography
• Iconography

10 – User Management

• Understanding organisations and users
• Building a user admin UI
• Building a user invite flow
• The user sign up flow
• Multi-organisation logic

11 – Build a SaaS Billing System With Stripe

• Creating the billing UI
• Upgrading, downgrading & cancelling
• Updating the credit cards
• Secure Customer Authentication (SCA)
• Implementing free trials

12 – Creating a Profile Page With Photo Uploads

• Creating the public profile page
• Creating the photo uploader
• Storing photos in Amazon S3
• Designing a photo grid
• Photo detail page with comments

13 – Building The Dashboard

• Building a SaaS dashboard
• Create the API key admin UI
• Tracking photo views
• Add photo metrics
• Building a help view

14 – Testing

• Why you should test
• Types of tests
• Writing unit tests
• Writing integration tests
• UI & user testing

15 – SaaS Security Practices

• Keep packages up to date
• Preventing XSS attacks
• Content security policies
• Understanding CORS
• Database security

16 – Deploying a SaaS Application

• Choosing a hosting platform
• Configuring the production environment
• Database SSL certificates
• Deploying to Heroku
• Building a deployment pipeline

17 – Next Steps

• Advanced features to consider
• Launching your app
• Marketing your app
• Building an audience
• Feedback

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